[fabsroman]

MT Pockets,

I caught the tail end of that episode and was also thinking it was fake. I didn't see the beginning, so I didn't know if the boat actually sank or not, but I was thinking to myself, this guy must be making a ton of money to sink a boat to film an episode because an insurance company will not pay for something like that if it is planned, and the show was definitely planned. How else would they have video equipment in the helicopter and HC-130? Then, after the commercial break, a black screen came on with some writing. Essentially, it said that this show was a dramatization done with the help of the search and rescue squad. In the end, he gave some props to the search and rescue guys and the armed forces overall, so that gave me some goose bumps. Hell, it gives them to me now. With that said, I think the show was pretty stupid. At the end, he was talking about how he made three mistakes while getting off the boat, and that those three mistakes could have ended up getting people killed.

Here is my big point. Why not have a couple of shows where you show people what type of safety equipment is a must when you go out into the ocean, and then show them exactly how to use everyuthing if the boat goes down. Make it a month's worth of episodes, because if it saves a single person, it is well worth it.

After catching the tail end of Tred Barta, I watched a fishing show done by Guy Harvey, a marine biologist and marine wildlife artist. An executive from ATCO, the company that prints a lot of T-Shirts with Guy Harvey's art on it, was also along for the trip. They were fishing for black marlin in Panama. That show was awesome. It was an hour long and they were showing them fishing for the marlin, but they were also showing how they put electronic tags in the fish that kept track of where the fish went and then popped up at a later date so the data can be read. Guy Harvey would actually dive into the water while the marlin was being reeled in and he would swim right up along the marlin and film it with an underwater camera. Towards the end of the show, they were showing how they did transfers of fish from other boats so that they could tag the fish for scientific purposes. Essentially, they throw their line over to the other boat using a tennis ball. Their line is then hooked up to the fish's leader once the mate on the other boat gets the leader, and the fish is then transferred to their boat using 80 lb. test instead of the regular 50 lb they were fishing with. The 80 lb. test is used to get the fish in quick instead of tiring it out some more and possibly killing it.

The greatest part of the show was when another boat was hooked up with a 13 ft. black marlin that weighed about 600+ pounds. They were going to do a transfer of that fish, but they guy battling it had been battling it for 4 hours and still had a long way to go. So, they transferred the ATCO guy from their boat onto the other boat, and Harvey swam down to the marlin with the other guys line in tow. He hooked up the other line to the leader, and both anglers were fighting the fish to try and get it in as qiuck as possible (i.e., so it didn't die) and tag it. Eventually, they were successful and the initial angler actually gave up a possible world record on 50 lb test to get the tag on the fish. Later on, they actually recovered the tag and found that the fish and swum down to Columbia and back up to Panama.

Oh yeah, Harvey also dove into a reef system and the number of fish was amazing. Of course, I don't think I would have liked to be in the water with groups of white tipped sharks, hammerheads, and huge groups of barracuda swimming around me, but the filming was beautiful and the pictures he showed were amazing.

I wish he had a weekly series I could watch.